10 Psychological States You’ve Never Heard Of — And When You Experienced Them

Annalee Newitz
—
Everybody knows what you mean when you say you're happy or sad. But
what about all those emotional states you don't have words for? Here are
ten feelings you may have had, but never knew how to explain.

1. Dysphoria
Often used to describe depression in psychological disorders, dysphoria
is general state of sadness that includes restlessness, lack of energy,
anxiety, and vague irritation. It is the opposite of euphoria, and is
different from typical sadness because it often includes a kind of
jumpiness and some anger. You have probably experienced it when coming
down from a stimulant like chocolate, coffee, or something stronger. Or
you may have felt it in response to a distressing situation, extreme
boredom, or depression.

2. EnthrallmentPsychology professor W. Gerrod Parrott
has broken down human emotions into subcategories, which themselves
have their own subcategories. Most of the emotions he identifies, like
joy and anger, are pretty recognizable. But one subset of joy,
"enthrallment," you may not have heard of before. Unlike the perkier
subcategories of joy like cheerfulness, zest, and relief, enthrallment
is a state of intense rapture. It is not the same as love or lust. You
might experience it when you see an incredible spectacle — a concert, a
movie, a rocket taking off — that captures all your attention and
elevates your mood to tremendous heights.

3. NormopathyPsychiatric theorist Christopher Bollas invented the idea of normopathy
to describe people who are so focused on blending in and conforming to
social norms that it becomes a kind of mania. A person who is normotic
is often unhealthily fixated on having no personality at all, and only
doing exactly what is expected by society. Extreme normopathy is
punctuated by breaks from the norm, where normotic person cracks under
the pressure of conforming and becomes violent or does something very
dangerous. Many people experience mild normopathy at different times in
their lives, especially when trying to fit into a new social situation,
or when trying to hide behaviors they believe other people would
condemn.

4. AbjectionThere are a few ways to define abjection, but French philosopher Julia Kristeva (literally) wrote the book
on what it means to experience abjection. She suggests that every human
goes through a period of abjection as tiny children when we first
realize that our bodies are separate from our parents' bodies — this
sense of separation causes a feeling of extreme horror we carry with us
throughout our lives. That feeling of abjection gets re-activated when
we experience events that, however briefly, cause us to question the
boundaries of our sense of self. Often, abjection is what you are
feeling when you witness or experience something so horrific that it
causes you to throw up. A classic example is seeing a corpse, but
abjection can also be caused by seeing shit or open wounds. These
visions all remind us, at some level, that our selfhood is contained in
what Star Trek aliens would call "ugly bags of mostly water." The only
thing separating you from being a dead body is . . . almost nothing.
When you feel the full weight of that sentence, or are confronted by its
reality in the form of a corpse, your nausea is abjection.

5. SublimationIf you've ever taken a class where
you learned about Sigmund Freud's theories about sex, you probably have
heard of sublimation. Freud believed that human emotions were sort of
like a steam engine, and sexual desire was the steam. If you blocked the
steam from coming out of one valve, pressure would build up and force
it out of another. Sublimation is the process of redirecting your steamy
desires from having naughty sex, to doing something socially productive
like writing an article about psychology or fixing the lawnmower or
developing a software program. If you've ever gotten your frustrations
out by building something, or gotten a weirdly intense pleasure from
creating an art project, you're sublimating. Other psychiatrists have
refined the idea of sublimation, however. Following French theorist
Jacques Lacan, they say that sublimation doesn't have to mean converting
sexual desire into another activity like building house. It could just
mean transferring sexual desire from one object to another — moving your
affections from your boyfriend to your neighbor, for example.

6. Repetition compulsion Ah, Freud. You gave us
so many new feelings and psychological states to explore! The repetition
compulsion is a bit more complicated than Freud's famous definition — "the desire to return to an earlier state of things."
On the surface, a repetition compulsion is something you experience
fairly often. It's the urge to do something again and again. Maybe you
feel compelled to always order the same thing at your favorite
restaurant, or always take the same route home, even though there are
other yummy foods and other easy ways to get home. Maybe your repetition
compulsion is a bit more sinister, and you always feel the urge to date
people who treat you like crap, over and over, even though you know in
advance it will turn out badly (just like the last ten times). Freud was
fascinated by this sinister side of the repetition compulsion, which is
why he ultimately decided that the cause of our urge to repeat was
directly linked to what he called "the death drive," or the urge to
cease existing. After all, he reasoned, the ultimate "earlier state of
things" is a state of non-existence before we were born. With each
repetition, we act out our desire to go back to a pre-living state.
Maybe that's why so many people have the urge to repeat actions that are
destructive, or unproductive.

7. Repressive desublimation
Political theorist Herbert Marcuse was a big fan of Freud and lived
through the social upheavals of the 1960s. He wanted to explain how
societies could go through periods of social liberation, like the
countercultures and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century, and yet
still remain under the (often strict) control of governments and
corporations. How could the U.S. have gone through all those protests in
the 60s but never actually overthrown the government? The answer, he
decided, was a peculiar emotional state known as "repressive
desublimation." Remember, Freud said sublimation is when you route your
sexual energies into something non-sexual. But Marcuse lived during a
time when people were very much routing their sexual energies into sex —
it was the sexual liberation era, when free love reigned. People were
desublimating. And yet they continued to be repressed by many other
social strictures, coming from corporate life, the military, and the
government. Marcuse suggested that desublimation can actually help to solidify repression.
It acts as an escape valve for our desires so that we don't attempt to
liberate ourselves from other social restrictions. A good example of
repressive desublimation is the intense partying that takes place in
college. Often, people in college do a lot of drinking, drugging and
hooking up — while at the same time studying very hard and trying to get
ready for jobs. Instead of questioning why we have to pay tons of money
to engage in rote learning and get corporate jobs, we just obey the
rules and have crazy drunken sex every weekend. Repressive
desublimation!

8. Aporia
You know that feeling of crazy emptiness you get when you realize that
something you believed isn't actually true? And then things feel even
more weird when you realize that actually, the thing you believed might
be true and might not — and you'll never really know? That's aporia. The
term comes from ancient Greek, but is also beloved of
post-structuralist theorists like Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak.
The reason modern theorists love the idea of aporia is that it helps to
describe the feeling people have in a world of information overload,
where you are often bombarded with contradictory messages that seem
equally true.

9. Compersion
We've gotten into some pretty philosophical territory, so now it's time
to return to some good, old-fashioned internet memes. The word
compersion was popularized by people in online communites devoted to polyamory and open relationships,
in order to describe the opposite of feeling jealous when your partner
dates somebody else. Though a monogamous person would feel jealous
seeing their partner kiss another person, a non-monogamous person could
feel compersion, a sense of joy in seeing their partner happy with
another person. But monogamous people can feel compersion, too, if we
extend the definition out to mean any situation where you feel the
opposite of jealous. If a friend wins an award you hoped to win, you can
still feel compersion (though you might be a little jealous too).

10. Group feelings
Some psychologists argue that there are some feelings we can only have as members of a group — these are called intergroup and intragroup feelings.
Often you notice them when they are in contradiction with your personal
feelings. For example, many people feel intergroup pride and guilt for
things that their countries have done, even if they weren't born when
their countries did those things. Though you did not fight in a war, and
are therefore not personally responsible for what happened, you share
in an intergroup feeling of pride or guilt. Group feelings often cause
painful contradictions. A person may have an intragroup feeling (from
one group to another) that homosexuality is morally wrong. But that
person may personally have homosexual feelings. Likewise, a person may
have an intragroup feeling that certain races or religions are inferior
to those of their group. And yet they may personally know very
honorable, good people from those races and religions whom they consider
friends. An group feeling can only come about through membership in a
group, and isn't something that you would ever have on your own. But
that doesn't mean group feelings are any less powerful than personal
ones.

1. DysphoriaOften used to describe depression in psychological disorders, dysphoria is general state of sadness that includes restlessness, lack of energy, anxiety, and vague irritation. It is the opposite of euphoria, and is different from typical sadness because it often includes a kind of jumpiness and some anger. You have probably experienced it when coming down from a stimulant like chocolate, coffee, or something stronger. Or you may have felt it in response to a distressing situation, extreme boredom, or depression.